En taktisk skjutspelsversion av Rainbow Six-veteranen lämnar äntligen Early Access

Ground Branch, the first-person tactical shooter built around strict realism, leaves early access on July 16 after nearly eight years on Steam. The game comes from BlackFoot Studios, founded by John Sonedecker, an artist who worked on the original Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon games at Redstorm Entertainment. That pedigree predates Ubisoft ending game development at Red Storm, which laid off 105 staff according to reports.

The project has been in development in one form or another since 2007. Its 2012 Kickstarter fell short of its funding target but pulled together a small community that has backed the game since it reached Steam early access in 2018. BlackFoot now says they are ready for version 1.0. As a measure of the studio's priorities, the blog announcement devotes a section to a smoother, more responsive door system.

The headline addition in 1.0 is the campaign, or at least its first stretch. Ground Branch previously ran a mode called Operations, a set of disconnected missions you could move between. Those return alongside a new prologue that eases players in and sets up the story for chapters to come.

A new Extraction mode arrives as well, and it does not follow the current extraction-shooter template. Instead, you and your teammates infiltrate a map to grab an AI hostage held by AI guards, then get them out. Make too much noise on the approach and the guards may panic and execute the hostage.

Development will not stop at launch. BlackFoot say that once 1.0 ships the game will have fulfilled its core promise, but the months after will bring new single-player chapters and, eventually, a mod kit so players can expand the shooter themselves.

The timing is what stands out to me. Ubisoft drifted away from the spirit of the original Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon years ago, and the recent gutting of Redstorm Entertainment has left a real gap for anyone who wants a straight-laced tactical shooter rather than a live-service one. I have been pulling out my copy of SWAT 4 to scratch that itch, and GROUND BRANCH on Steam, hitting full release, reads less like a coincidence and more like the right game showing up at the right moment.

There is a long-running joke threaded through the game's coverage. Rock Paper Shotgun's Adam Smith first wrote about the Ground Branch Kickstarter back in 2012 and, by the outlet's own ribbing, never filed a follow-up on its development, the running explanation being that he is now writing director at Larian and short on time. The point underneath the joke is real: this is a project people have tracked for well over a decade, and the v1.0 date finally puts an endpoint on the early-access stretch.

What 1.0 does not do is close the book. The prologue and returning Operations cover the launch, the campaign chapters fill in afterward, and the mod kit hands the rest to the community. For a game that has spent eight years iterating in public on the strength of a small, committed player base, that staged rollout fits the pattern the studio has kept to since 2018.

The realism focus is the throughline across all of it. Ground Branch has built its reputation on detail most shooters skip, the kind of game where a door system earns its own changelog entry. The Extraction mode's hostage logic, where noise discipline decides whether the objective survives, sits in the same tradition as the older tactical shooters Sonedecker helped build, the ones that rewarded patience over reflexes. That is the itch Siege and the open-world Ghost Recon experiments never fully scratched for players who came up on the originals.

Ground Branch reaches v1.0 on July 16 on Steam, with single-player chapters and a mod kit to follow.

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